Ferrets! radio telescopes! and henchmen!

• It's very, very rare that the first video from a new YouTube creator is good — or, frankly, anything more than embarrassing. Yet, somehow, Keith Sachs has managed it! He's a maker, he's steadily building an automated litter box for his cats, and this is part one of the story. I didn't expect to watch all ten minutes of this, but the storytelling is great, to the point where I suspect Keith has more experience than the otherwise-blank channel would suggest! Yes, it's a bit rough around the edges in places — there's a couple of times where science explanations get a little lost in the weeds, and I'd recommend he pick a stage name that isn't an allusion to profanity, because that feels like the sort of thing that gets awkward when your audience gets larger. But those quibbles aside: this is good! Back before reality TV stole the idiom, "x factor" referred to a certain unknown star quality, something indescribable that made people think "this person has potential". Well, this channel has that "x factor". (Thanks to an anonymous reader for sending this in.)
   
• Ferrets! If three minutes about how small mustelids help get cables through tight spaces wasn't enough, stick around for the brilliant advice on how to relax a ferret. Just in case you ever need to relax a ferret.
   
• I never got to film the giant, 230-ton dish antennas of the Very Large Array being moved between configurations: it was one of the videos that got away from me. There's not really any professional documentation of the giant dishes being moved, but this video is some great raw footage from someone who not only got to witness it, but got to ride on the strange double-railroad transporter! Stick around for the wheels that rotate on more than one axis.
   
• The last YouTube video spot in this newsletter is often taken up with "good music video I remembered", and this is no exception. It's been years since I saw the video for Miike Snow's song Genghis Khan, but I was reminded of it this week. James Bond parodies have been played out since the Austin Powers movies, but this still works: perhaps because it's shot on actual 35mm film, with the post-work dirtying up the footage so it looks less like a 1970s film, and more like a memory of a 1970s film watched on a CRT. The background gags, with the occasional henchman mugging an "ooh" to camera, help as well. This is just a lot of fun to watch.
   

• Excellent clickbait title: why you've never been in a plane crash. This is a great breakdown of the culture around air crash investigations, "just culture", and how a single human error is never a root cause.
   
• A fascinating page from 1926: how photos were transmitted across the Atlantic with only a slow telegraph code.
   
• "An agricultural air cannon began firing every two minutes all night long disrupting the sleep of many in my community. I used Google Maps, three listening posts, and a programmed simulation to pinpoint the field hosting the air cannon." Is there a more elegant mathematical solution to this problem? Absolutely. But it doesn't matter, because brute-force code worked.
   

And finally: I don't care if this video of a game of blind man's buff is scripted. It probably is. It still made me laugh.

All the best,

— Tom